My social media usage story

How do I actually feel about my social media usage?

I mainly made this observational survey to explore how I feel about social media usage versus how I think I feel.

I want to explore three questions:

• When do I use social media
• Does the time of day affect my rating? (based on AM vs PM)
• Are the ratings different if I know whether or not I should be using social media?

What I think the answers will be:

• Probably after midnight
• Probably yes
• Yes

Exploring these three questions will give me insight into how I feel about social media.

When do I use social media?

The first part we explore is whether I am using social media at healthy times (not late at night)

A gif of a person sleeping under a blanket

First plot of the day

This is a bar plot of social media usage against the hour of day

The answer is, I don’t use social media at healthy times

The graph above makes it very noticeable when I open a social media app and start doom scrolling. Most often after midnight, you can see my social media opening consistency between 12 AM and 6 AM.

Seeing this makes me want to stop/reduce my use of social media, mainly after midnight.

Does the time of day affect my rating? (based on AM vs PM)

Do I feel good using social media in the AMS vs the PMS?

Second Plot: Electric Boogaloo

A boxplot consisting of grouped responses to Q2 and median ratings

Surprise, I am unhappy when using social media at night.

I expected this because I became much more aware when I started logging data about my social media phone usage.

So, reducing my use of social media at night is still necessary.

Are the ratings different if I know whether or not I should be using social media?

Yeah, I feel like the answer to this question is obvious, but exploring the data is better than how I think I’ll feel.

Third Plot: Threequel :)

A boxplot consisting of social media platform and median ratings of each social media platform

Yeah, I rate way lower when I should not be using social media.

That is a straightforward answer since the rating median is way lower for the No group than the Yes group.

Conclusion

The story’s theme here is that social media is terrible for me, especially when I use it after midnight. I rate lower when it is time in the morning (or after midnight), and when I should not use social media.

So, the data here confirms what I thought the answers were before, and seeing this makes me more aware of how I use social media and when I should use it.